Bill Pronzini: Mourners

… hardest thing I’ve ever had to do is make this call…

Little quiver in his voice, real emotional.

… hate to have to hurt you, I’m so sorry…

You’re sorry, all right, sorry excuse for a man.

… there’s somebody else, somebody I’ve known for a while…

Lyrics out of a bad old song.

… she’s a second violinist with the philharmonic here…

Sure, that figures.

… her name’s Mary, she’s from Rochester, New York…

Do I give a shit who she is or where she’s from?

… we’re in love, crazy in love…

Like you and I never were, right?

… didn’t want it to happen, neither of us did…

More bad lyrics, a whole damn chorus.

… as serious as it gets, we’re going to be married in the fall

…

Only wedding gift you’ll get from me is a gallon of rat poison.

… wish to God it could have turned out differently for you and me…

Bullshit.

… never stop loving you, Tamara, even if you find that hard to believe now…

Hard to believe? Try impossible.

… want only the best for you, always…

Can’t say the same for you. So long, you big lying sweet-mouth son of a bitch, I hope Mary strangles you with one your cello strings someday.

She wished now that she been able to say something like that to him, something hard and wounding-gotten in the last word. Instead, her mind a blank, all she’d done was hang up. End of conversation, end of five-year relationship. End of love. With a click, not a bang, from three thousand miles away.

Not that the Dear Tamara call had come as any big surprise. No word from him in nearly three weeks, two messages she’d left on his answering machine that he hadn’t returned. Oh, yeah, she’d seen it coming even with her eyes wide shut. All those months apart, seven long months of no contact except by phone, too busy in her case, too hooked up with somebody else in his, to follow through on plans to spend a few days together in Philly or here.

Saw it coming, sure. But she didn’t expect it to come cold like that, him calling her at the agency instead of at the apartment-it had thrown her off balance. Thought he had more class, more courage, than that. Thought she knew him so well… how stupid was that? She didn’t know him at all. Consider herself lucky she wasn’t the one marrying him after all, Mary from Rochester could have him and good riddance. Didn’t want it to happen, neither of us did. What a load of crap. Back there screwing the second violinist for God knew how long, months probably, while she sat around pining away for him and being Ms. Faithful, putting her own needs on hold, keeping herself pure at heart for her big lovin’ man The hell with it.

The hell with him.

Fuck men!

… Well, now, there’s an idea.

More than seven months since she’d done the nasty New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day farewell marathon with Horace. Seven months of denying herself, keeping the faith, living the lie. Well, not anymore. Cruise the clubs tonight, pick up the first good-looking guy who showed an interest in her-black, white, Asian, Martian, didn’t make any difference-and go to his place or bring him back here and let him hump her brains out. Why not? Horny, wasn’t she? Sauce for the goose, right?

She showered, changed into the sexiest outfit she owned, put on her makeup, brushed her hair and dabbed on a little perfume, and went out to the car. Horace’s Toyota. Her Toyota now… Keep it, Tamara, I want you to have it.

She was two blocks from the apartment before she realized, dammit, dammit, that she was crying.

Emily was home alone when I walked into our Diamond Heights condo a little past six. Some kind of godawful teen-shriek music poured out of her room, so I knew even before I went in there that she was by herself; one strict rule in the household is that she wears a headset when Kerry and I are on the premises. She was at her desk, working on her computer-which was also the source of the noise being perpetrated by a young female vocalist and a percussive band-and wiggling around the way kids do in time to the assault on her ears and mine. And to think that when I’d first met her, not so long ago, she’d been such a shy, introspective, quiet little girl.

I had to yell at her twice before she knew I was home. She popped the CD out of her laptop, but even in the sudden quiet I could still hear and feel the afterechoes. If she kept listening to that kind of stuff at such a volume, she’d be wearing a hearing aid before she was fifty.

“It’s after six,” she said in an amazed voice. “Sorry, Dad. I should’ve put on my headset, but I was surfing the Net and I guess I lost track of the time.”

“How can you concentrate with that racket going on?”

“Racket? That’s Shannon Stark’s new CD.”

“Who?”

“Shannon Stark. She plays Holly Grimes on TV.”

“Sure she does.”

“All my friends think she’s major cool.”

“What do you think?”

“Well… I like others better.”

“So you’re not going to start singing the way Holly does?”

“Shannon. No,” she said seriously, “I don’t think so.”

So there was still hope for the kid yet. Emily has a fine, sweet voice and singing is one of her favorite pastimes. The thought of her emulating Shannon Stark or any other noisy teenage idol was not a happy one.

“The CD’s not mine anyway,” Emily said. “Carla’s brother downloaded it off the Internet.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Well, technically, but everybody does it.”

“You’d better be the exception. Where’s Kerry?”

“She has to work late tonight.”

“First I’ve heard of it. How late?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her.”

“She didn’t pick you up? How’d you get home from Carla’s?”

“Um, by bus.”

“Bus? You know we don’t like you riding buses alone.”

“Carla’s mom couldn’t take me because she had an appointment, so she called Mom and she said it was okay.”

I sorted that out. “Kerry said it was okay for you to take the bus?”

“Yes.”

“Well… how long have you been home?”

“Since around three thirty. I called Mom’s office to tell her I was here, but she was in a meeting. I left a message.”

“And she didn’t call back?”

“No.”

None of this was making me happy. It wasn’t like Kerry to okay a solitary bus ride, or not to check up when Emily was home alone. Usually she worried about the kid as much as I did-one of the curses of becoming adoptive parents at our age. But she hadn’t been herself recently. Working long hours, but I had the feeling there was something preying on her mind as well. And I was afraid I knew what it was.

Emily had noticed it, too. She said, “Mom’s been sort of preoccupied and forgetful lately.”

I nodded. And broody and not much interested in making love.

“But she’s okay, isn’t she?”

“Sure she is. Just working too hard.”

Emily shut down her computer, stood up and stretched-and when she did that, turning my way, I found myself staring at her. Really seeing her for the first time since I’d come into the room. You expect your loved ones, other people close to you, to look the way they always do, and you don’t always notice changes right away. Even normally observant detectives are guilty of that kind of temporary blindness on occasion.

“You’re wearing lipstick,” I said.

Sheepish look. “Oh, right, I forgot to take it off.”

“And makeup. Is that eye shadow?”

“Shadow, liner, and mascara. And a little rouge to highlight my cheekbones.”

“You rode the bus alone like that? My God, Emily, what’s the idea?”